Lorenzo Silva (Madrid, 1966) is a copy of Bevilacqua, the first part of the contracting party that has been nurturing for years – 13 installments are already – the saga that best illustrates the “picolicie” in the Spanish novel. Neat and formal, in the power of a prose that delves into the soul of human beings, but is attentive to what is happening around because all times have their concerns and those of us who go through life are children of our circumstances. As happens to his star protagonist, he knows first-hand what it is to “commit to causes where he rarely awaits a prize” beyond that half hour that he reserves every night, and that he squeezes with relish, and in which he reads to his daughter 9 years old – “in the original version, no adaptations”, he specifies – the novels of Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas. And it is that this man, with hardly any social life and with a concept of friendship where “15 people barely fit”, lives by and for books. And since everything that doesn’t add up subtracts, he says categorically that he doesn’t even watch series anymore. “It would be as much as changing caviar for canned foie gras.”
Monday
6:30 a.m. My cell phone wakes me up, but without shrillness. A quick shower, a look at the newspapers and the day’s appointments, and breakfast: two eggs – of which I only eat the whites – a long coffee latte and a squeezed juice. If I take the girl to school, I have time to read; if my wife does it, I’ll be on my way by a quarter past eight.
8.45. hours. I live in Getafe, but I work in Illescas (Toledo), in a house where we spend weekends, vacations, holidays. It seems like a full-fledged trip, but it’s twenty minutes in the ‘Volvo’ – it has two –, which I’ve also always felt contrary to heavy traffic. I, who have had four children and wrote even traveling by subway and standing, now discover that with silence you surrender much more.
10:00 a.m. My day to day is quite monastic and the method, invariable. I have the map in my head before I start writing, which doesn’t mean I don’t make changes on the fly. There is no cork in front of all the characters developed or the phases they have to go through. I don’t even take notes. In my previous life –he has been an auditor, a tax consultant and for 12 years a lawyer– I fought the traffic jams in Madrid like this, shaping stories in my head that I later put on paper when I had a little free time, which was few. I have kept the habit and, as I am old, it is a mental gymnastics that I recommend to everyone.
Tuesday
2:15 p.m. I stop to exercise. When I lived in Barcelona, I would take my bike and go to the beach that was 8 kilometers from home, crossing the Llobregat park. Just 10 minutes looking at the waves was enough to recharge the batteries. As I am now in the Meseta, I have no sea and the climate here is much more hostile, I have changed it for something much sadder but more effective: the elliptical.
3:00 p.m. I’m not a cook at all, I leave the boasts to my wife, who embroiders the fish. I don’t eat much or complicate my life: I prepare a salad and some turkey, or I go down to Mercadona and buy a tray of sushi. Only in this way, with that mixture of frugality and exercise, do I manage to work another four hours in the afternoon, although when I am in a particularly fruitful moment or the novel requires a certain immersion, I prolong it until ten at night and stay there to sleep.
9:30 p.m. Today there was no need for excesses. I come home and find the best moment of the day, which is when I take Nùria to bed and we read for half an hour. Now we are with ‘The Viscount Bragelonne’, after having finished ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘Twenty Years Later’. But the original, mind you, it’s 1,500 pages, no adaptations. We picked up the habit during the pandemic and she has gained more reading comprehension and her performance in school has skyrocketed. ‘White Fang’, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’… I didn’t do it with my other children –already older, one has become independent and the others live with their mother– and now I regret it.
Wednesday
12.00 noon. I’m in full promotion of ‘La llama de Focea’ and today I have to travel to the Frankfurt Fair. When I read the most is when I travel, if the flight or the train lasts three hours I am capable of getting a book of 400 pages. My agent is waiting for me, we’ll go out for a walk and have some dinner.
10:30 p.m. I am finishing a magnificent book, without translating it into Spanish thanks to our unique publishing ecosystem. Ales Adamovich’s ‘Khatyn’ recounts the massacres of Nazi liquidator groups in Belarus in 1943, a terrible story about the horror of war and why these Slavs are so tough.
“The political climate is becoming more and more rarefied. And it is so because there is no community of interests and solidarity is not worked on»
Thursday
6:30 a.m. I check the news as soon as I get up. The political environment is increasingly rarefied. I believe that the problem is that there is no community of interests and solidarity is not worked on, and a society that does not practice this with its members has at least a reserved prognosis. For example, the renovation of the judiciary that has been stalled for years. What does that say about us as a society? Well, we are governed by somewhat unscrupulous people; that we have two supposed state parties incapable of amending something that discredits the country does not speak well of them.
12.00 noon. My works deal with the end of terrorism, our presence in Afghanistan, the drama of the Strait, the Catalan independence movement… Paul Preston says that mine is beginning to resemble the National Episodes, which makes me blush a lot because it wouldn’t even occur to me compare my results with those of Galdós. But it is true that there is a literature that, while delving into the human soul, is attentive to what is happening around us. I think that was Galdós’s look and of course I try to make it mine.
Friday
1:00 p.m. Back to Spain. In this society, only the headlines make headlines and analysis is conspicuous by its absence. Without stopping, we jump from treetop to treetop and thus we lose all the forest below. A society where, in addition, forms matter less and less, which is often a symptom of having lost the bottom.
10:00 p.m. I watch very few series. My wife and I, who are both dedicated to writing, came to the conclusion that we were wasting time reading. Come on, we were swapping caviar for canned foie gras. Lately we’ve made an exception for ‘Better call Saul’, the prequel to ‘Breaking bad’, which doesn’t insult my intelligence with tricks.
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